February 2016

Beginner’s Guide to Creating Fanart is a column by contributor Jae Bailey. In this column, Jae offers digital fanart tutorials and advice for aspiring artists. Welcome back for another fanart tutorial for beginners! If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, do that first and then come back. In it you can find advice on which software and hardware to use, as well as general tips and links to YouTube tutorials, including a YouTube video that explains how to use adjustment layers to touch up //

Transfic, an emerging genre of fanfiction, refers to stories about transgender characters who do not usually identify as trans in canon. Unlike its precursor (genderswap) or parent (genderfuck) genres, which often gloss over sex and gender issues through the use of problematic tropes, transfic foregrounds the materialities of sex and gender transitions and strives to account for a full-range of transgender experiences. Looking at the archival history of this genre can help contextualize its //

“Don’t like, don’t read!” used to be pasted into the summary or author’s note of every second fanfic on FanFiction.net. The phrase has recently fallen out of use—with good reason! In the age of dashboards, tags, and newsfeeds, the phrase seems comically out of step with reality. We all know what we don’t want to read but that doesn’t prevent us from finding such content while we’re scrolling through the latest fandom posts. Desktop and laptop //

It doesn’t matter which genre is your favorite, or which fandom you call home—we’ve all felt the sting of a treasured show getting canceled prematurely. Thanks to reported ratings, a fan community can usually tell when a show is in its final moments. But sometimes a series that otherwise seems original, well-executed, and superbly written, can be canned before it has had a chance to find stable footing. What is a fan to do, then, when their favorite show comes to an abrupt close, leaving //

If you’re familiar with the cartoon Bob’s Burgers, you may be aware of the oldest child’s obsession with writing “FriendFiction” because she ran out of fanfiction topics to write on. Tina Belcher has binders filled with stories starring her friends and classmates in elaborate fictional stories in which she often plays a key role. This isn’t just a figment of the show writers’ imaginations, real-person fiction is a real thing (I touched on the implications of real-person shipping //

If you’ve ever been in a fandom of any kind, you’ve probably noticed that animosity can occur between the shippers and the non-shippers. Most fans who aren’t into shipping just learn to tolerate or avoid it, but some take it very personally, claiming that it is ruining the fandom for them. In extreme cases, it causes people to leave a fandom entirely or even stop watching or reading something they used to like. Nowhere are these reactions better seen than in Tumblr confession blogs. These //

“StormPilot” – the wildly popular new slash ship from the new Star Wars: Force Awakens film – has taken both fandom and the mainstream media by storm. Articles abound in mainstream press outlets about the pairing, discussing with all seriousness its genuine popularity and the possibility of its canonization. While pieces like this historically were often a not so subtle dig at the strange, exotic customs of those subcultural oddities – the fangirls and boys and people of the world – //

WARNING: This article may contain spoilers. My love of The X-Files series can be traced back to its beginning episodes. The storylines drew me in every week, until the last couple of seasons, when the writing fell a little flat for me. I have vivid and distinct memories of specific episodes, like when the Cigarette Smoking Man (played by William B. Davis) and several other government officials were deciding who will win the Superbowl. To say I was looking forward to The X-Files revival would //

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FAN/FIC is an online magazine for fanfic readers and writers. We publish compelling articles and personal essays about fan culture, practical advice on how to improve your craft, and interviews with people in the community.